Do you want to accelerate your Microsoft Power Platform adoption to solve business problems and increase productivity across your organization? Are you a technology change manager looking for best practices for planning and delivering a Power Platform adoption project? Or are you a Power Platform champion who sees the value of Power Platform in your team and needs resources to help bring structure to your company’s adoption approach? Today is your day! We have just launched new content and workbooks designed to help you create and implement the business and technology strategies necessary for your organization to succeed with Microsoft Power Platform: https://adoption.microsoft.com/powerplatform Advancing adoption and cultivating a low code culture is about more than implementing technology features. Technology can assist an organization in making the greatest impact, but successful low code culture involves considerations across people, processes, and technology. This new practical information will help you successfully achieve your desired business outcomes with your adoption effort: Power Platform on adoption.microsoft.com The Power Platform content on adoption.microsoft.com is your one place to find a collection of content relevant to your adoption journey. It helps you get started, engage your org, train your org, find your champions, and govern your environments. Adoption planning workbook We’ve compiled an easy-to-follow how-to guide that walks you and your team, step-by-step, through the best way to adopt Power Platform in your organization. The insights we share come from our most successful customers, who have maximized the power of their investments. This workbook provides you with proven guidance to help you create and implement the business and technology strategies necessary for your organization to succeed with Microsoft Power Platform. Hackathon planning workbook Use this guide when you want to learn more about how to plan and run a hackathon event. This workbook provides you with checklists of what to consider, along with survey forms and email templates to use. What’s next? Power Platform adoption efforts typically align to the following three areas: Strategy & Vision, Nurture & Educate, and Admin & Governance. The new content focuses primarily on providing guidance and best practices for the Strategy & Vision and Nurture & Educate buckets. This gives you a great starting point on your Power Platform adoption journey – and once you’re ready for the next steps, we’ll have you covered with more workbooks that are currently being developed: Champion program workbook to help you develop an internal Champions community Training strategy workbook to guide you in developing an upskilling journey for your makers Governance guardrails workbook to help your Power Platform admins follow best practices as they set out to secure, manage, and monitor your Power Platform adoption

Happy new year everyone! Since 2022 has started, we have released new deployment pipelines features, that enable plenty of new ways to work with deployment...

Historically, getting started with Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) for the Microsoft Power Platform came with a learning curve and lots of time investment setting up ALM. Based on our own learnings setting up ALM for the Center of Excellence (CoE) Starter kit, we’re excited to introduce you to the public preview of the ALM Accelerator for Power Platform – a new reference implementation that is now also part of the Center of Excellence (CoE) Starter Kit. What is the ALM Accelerator? The ALM Accelerator for Power Platform includes a canvas app that sits on top of Azure DevOps Pipelines and Git source control. The app provides a simplified interface for makers to regularly export the components in their Power Platform Solutions to source control and create deployment requests to have their work reviewed before deploying to target environments. The ALM Accelerator for Power Platform is a complement to the ALM guidance available under the Overview of application lifecycle management with Microsoft Power Platform. It was originally developed to facilitate ALM for the CoE Starter Kit team. We are now sharing what we’ve built for our own use and open sourcing it to help you understand how you can apply ALM patterns & practices with the Power Platform. You can use the ALM Accelerator as-is, customize it to meet your requirements, or as a reference implementation to see how we’ve addressed ALM scenarios. To learn more, you can watch an overview video of the ALM Accelerator for Power Platform below. We also have documentation to Set up ALM Accelerator for Power Platform components, Use ALM Accelerator for Power Platform components and videos of ALM Accelerator for Power Platform Walkthroughs (Preview). Who should try out this component? The ALM Accelerator provides a solution for setting up an enhanced ALM experience for both code first and low code developers. Within this single accelerator, we have provided both a simplified experience, for those who want to get started with ALM, as well as more advanced experiences for people who want more control over the ALM process. We expect the ALM Accelerator to be used by the Power Platform maker who is comfortable with using Power Platform solution management. For advanced makers with experience using Git, Azure DevOps, and basic ALM concepts (e.g., source control, pushes, pull requests, branching, merging, and CI/CD), we offer capabilities to allow them to work the way they want. To use the advanced maker capabilities, there is an expectation that you have foundational knowledge about those capabilities. What is different from ALM Accelerator for Makers? Originally, we announced ALM Accelerator for Makers, which makers can use to apply source control strategies by using GitHub and move solutions from development to test and production environments. It abstracted away some of the complexities of ALM, to help make it more approachable to low code developers new to ALM. Since then, we have been working on improvements to bring experiences from that accelerator into a unified accelerator. We have also heard from customers who use Azure DevOps that they want a simplified experience as well. Whether you are planning to set up ALM for basic or advanced scenarios, the new ALM Accelerator for Power Platform aims to help you with your ALM strategy. For now, the unified experience supports only Azure DevOps using pipelines using Microsoft Power Platform Build Tools for Azure DevOps. However, we have plans to add support for GitHub workflows using GitHub Actions for Microsoft Power Platform in the future. As part of this unification process, we will no longer be providing new enhancements to ALM Accelerator for Makers. If you have any issues or bugs with the older accelerator, please post them on GitHub; we’ll continue to address them. Getting started You can get started by going to ALM Accelerator for Power Platform “ALM Accelerator for Power Platform” section in Microsoft Docs. You can learn more about our backlog of issues and enhancements in on GitHub . We have also turned on GitHub Discussions and would encourage you to ask questions there. We would love your feedback! Prior to this announcement, we’ve been building the ALM Accelerator out in the open on GitHub since March 2021. We’ve had several customers participate in our previous preview releases to help gather feedback. The feedback helped us evolve the accelerator to be more generic and flexible beyond how we were initially using it. We’re eager to get more feedback. We’d like to invite you to try out our public preview, help us make it even more flexible, and evolve it to meet your needs! If you have any new ideas, feel free to post them in GitHub ! Disclaimer Some of the underlying features and components used to build the ALM such as Canvas source code tool integrated with Power Platform CLI are in preview, and the kit itself represents sample implementations of these preview features. Our customers and community can use and customize these features to implement ALM capabilities in their organizations. However, note that this kit is also under preview until the dependent features are also generally available.

Welcome to the Power Apps community call. These calls are the 3rd Wednesday of each month where we share the latest news about Power Apps, demonstrate tips and tools to help you build amazing Power Apps. In these calls you will meet the Power Apps product team and community experts to get your questions answered.  For the month of January, we have two very exciting topics! Community rockstar Shadrack Inusah will walk through how to create an audio player using Power Apps and Kavishi Agarwal will walk through the new Power Apps Pay-as-you-go features. If you are not familiar with Pay-as-you-go it is a new way to pay for Power Apps using an Azure subscription, which allows you to get started building and sharing apps without any license commitment or upfront purchasing. WhenJanuary 19th, 2022, 8AM PST Where:https://aka.ms/powerappscall-join Agenda  Introductions by April Dunnam & Todd Baginski Power Audio Player by Shadrack Inusah New Pay-as-you-go Features by Kavishi Agarwal Power Apps Community Call Quiz by April & Todd Recent Power Apps News and Community Contributions by April & Todd  Next call details by Todd Baginski Kavishi Agarwal Senior Program Manager| Microsoft |Carnegie Mellon  I am Senior Product Manager in the Power Apps product team and is passionate about creating experiences that customers love. I have been a part of Microsoft a little over 3 years and have been working on Power Apps since. I am currently leading the Pay-as-you-go business model for Power Apps along with other licensing related initiatives.  Shadrack Inusah I’m an IT/Compliance assistance at DreamOval where I handle device management on Azure, build and manage Business Applications in M365. A Gold Microsoft Learn Student Ambassador with community building and leading experience and a member of the Microsoft Learn Student Ambassadors Low Code No Code League. I help students learn and build together to solve a technical world problem. I write technical blogs about Power Platform on the Microsoft Tech Community blog site. I have introduced and trained over 100+ students on the Power Platform and have built amazing Power Apps where I became 2nd best Power Platform builder in Africa and a first-time speaker during the Power Platform Global Bootcamp in 2021. I mentor students for the Microsoft Learn Student Ambassadors program across Africa. LinkedIn  April Dunnam I’m a Power Platform Developer Advocate at Microsoft and Power Platform MVP Alumni. As a Power Platform Developer Advocate, my mission is to help citizen and code-first developers succeed in building collaborative applications for the Power Platform. I develop written content, videos, and samples; speak at conferences; and advocate for developers with Microsoft’s engineering groups. I have an active YouTube Channel and blog where I share how-to videos and demos around Power Apps, Power Automate, Teams and SharePoint. I regularly speak at events across the globe to share Power Platform knowledge.(99+) April Dunnam | LinkedIn I’m a proud Partner, and the CTO at Canviz where I am currently leading several projects that include PowerApps, Azure, Office 365, SharePoint Framework, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, full web stack, and numerous other technologies.Sharing my expertise and knowledge with others is important to me, I love to teach. I’ve been blessed to receive the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional Award for the last 13 years. This award recognizes my contributions to the technical communities I am a part of. For over a decade, I have created close relationships with the Microsoft SharePoint & Azure teams which provides me access to early releases. My team and I work closely with the Microsoft teams before products are released publicly to develop training and samples that are distributed worldwide to architects and developers. I give back to my local community by coaching and growing youth sports teams; emphasizing hard work, excellent sportsmanship, teamwork, and leadership.https://toddbaginski.com/blog/ 

Since the Report Viewer control was first introduced over a decade ago, it has been a key component that allowed developers to surface report...

After we announced public preview of Power Apps Ideas, including writing Power Fx formulas with natural language and generating formulas from examples, we continued tuning the design and improving our AI model to make Ideas work better for you. Today, we’re happy to share some of the latest updates on Ideas with you. Transforming natural language to formulas Expanded support for more data sources – Data source connections are no longer limited to Dataverse; you can now use Power Apps Ideas with galleries and data tables connected to other data sources, such as Sharepoint and Excel. Supporting more ways to filter a data table – More data querying scenarios are supported including filter by Choice columns, Yes/No columns. Now you can try active ‘Contacts’ in Ideas to filter by Contact status. Improved understanding of natural language – In our efforts to provide an experience with language that really is “natural”, we made significant improvements to our AI model to make it smarter and understand more natural input. For example, instead of typing ‘Contacts’ whose ‘Full Name’ starts with “Yvonne”, you can simply type Full Name starts with Yvonne to get the same formula. Enhanced UI for formula suggestions – The formula suggestions are now displayed in cards, and there is a greater focus on the natural language description of what the formula is doing, so it will be easier for makers to review and understand the results. Programming by example Increased region and language availability – Programming by example has rolled out to all the Power Apps regions and languages so more makers can benefit from it. Improved formula results – We made significant improvements in our AI model to make the resulting formula suggestions less complex while still providing the same functionality. Simplifying complicated formulas not only makes it easier to understand and maintain the formula, but also significantly enhances performance. What’s next for Ideas Transforming natural language to formulas: Continue to add support of more scenarios including generating formulas to manipulate content of a label, changing color and visibility based on conditions, support filter by lookup columns. Continue to enhance the model so it can better understand natural language queries and provide more accurate suggestions. Improve the usability and discoverability of Ideas so it will become more handy and easier to find. Programming by example: Improve the model quality so it can generate accurate yet simple formulas. Improve the usability of Train with examples, so when the suggested formula doesn’t meet your needs, you can easily tune the results by providing additional examples.